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First, the ASCII issue. PHP, Ruby, Perl 5.6, etc., etc. don't support Unicode. Those saw plenty of use anyway. (PG mentions on his site that people wouldn't have complained about this if he hadn't brought it up. I agree; this is whining about the bikeshed color.)

Next, car and cdr. Most LISP programmers I've talked to (including myself), prefer car and cdr to head and tail or first and rest. First, head/tail and first/rest don't make much sense when applied to an improper list (i.e. (cons 1 2)). car/cdr is less specific to lists, so I find it to be more readable in that case. Secondly, you can't "chain" first/rest or head/tail. To get the second element in the list, you can say (cadr foo). Without car/cdr, you have (head (tail foo)), which is just unnecessary verbosity. Finally, car/cdr are easier to type than the alternatives.

Perl 5.6 does support Unicode... badly, but it does support it. And what was one of the major things we put into 5.8 (begun in 2000) despite it causing vast amounts of internals grief? Unicode. Also keep in mind that 5.6 development started in 1998 when you could still fool yourself that ASCII was all you needed. Even so, the diverse array of Perl developers recognized it was necessary even if it was very painful.

Actually, programmers in the UK are more likely to be paid in British pounds. Of course the symbol for that (£) isn't ASCII either. Even Americans can't render the symbol for cents (¢) without venturing outside ASCII.

Ruby, Perl and Python are all at least as old as Unicode itself. PHP is PHP. What excuse does Arc have to dismiss Unicode as “unimportant”?

And I agree entirely with what Schwern said: if Paul Graham had written that Unicode doesn’t concern him now, but he’ll get around to it before he starts telling people to use Arc for serious work, I wouldn’t have said a peep about it.

F.ex., who cares if he thinks using tables for layout is somehow more exploratory and agile. No one has